Gala was so sad, maybe disappointed. She had been happy to hear through a rumor that Hock had gotten away on the river, even if her heart was sore. But the news that he had been captured made her sad again. The reason was that she had warned him of dangers. And someone — maybe the laundry woman was to blame — had heard and told Festus Manyenga. They went to her house, some boys. They scolded Gala for warning him. They said they would beat her if she was cheeky again. She must not speak to Hock, ever. That was the story, much as she told it.
“I can talk to her,” Hock said. “They can’t hurt me.”
“But Gala, they can hurt her,” Zizi said. “She is very old.”
Younger than me, he thought. But he stayed away. And in her role as his protector, Zizi seemed unusually responsive; resourceful, too, revealing an intelligence and subtlety he had not seen before.
A few days after this conversation, she brought him news that a boy had returned to the village from Blantyre, where he lived, one of Manyenga’s family, a brother — but everyone was a brother.
“What is he doing in Blantyre?”
“Schooling,” Zizi said in English, and again, “Or wucking.”
“I want to see him.”
Zizi took the message to Manyenga — it would have been against protocol for her to go to the boy directly. And it was an indication of how eager Manyenga was to please Hock that the boy visited within a few hours. It seemed that he was prepared to agree with anything that Hock asked, except the only important one, his release. Let me go, he wanted to say again, but he knew what the answer would be. He would not sit and be defied, or lied to, or jeered at, so he didn’t ask. In everything else, he was obeyed. Manyenga had said, You can have any woman in this village.
His name was Aubrey, and he was not a boy — twenty or so — but had the thin careworn face of someone even older. Although it was nearing dusk when he arrived at Hock’s hut, he wore sunglasses. They were new, and there was something menacing in their stylishness. His short-sleeved shirt was new, not one from the secondhand pile at the market, the castoffs from America they called salaula, their word for rummaging. His trousers, too, looked new, and when he saw that Hock was studying them, he offered the information that they were from Europe, a present. He had the slight build and small head and short legs that Hock was used to seeing in the Sena, but he was more confident, somewhat restless, shifting on the stool that Hock offered him, the bamboo one with squeaky legs.
Aubrey had a way of holding his head down at an odd butting angle, with his mouth half open, as though anticipating combat. Just behind his lips, the inside of his mouth was pink. The parted mouth made him seem both hungry and impatient, breathing hard, and for a reason Hock could not explain, the open mouth seemed satirical, too, as if Aubrey was on the point of laughing.
“How old are you?”
“Funny question,” Aubrey said.
“Just a normal question.”
“Twenty-two,” he said, and jerked in his chair, revealing a cell phone in a holster at his belt.
“I want to make a call on your phone,” Hock said.
Now the mouth parted a bit more as Aubrey laughed. “No coverage here. This is the boonies.”
From the first he seemed to have an American accent, an affected one, something slurring and nasal in his delivery, a deliberate carelessness, a gratuitous rapidity. And boonies?
“Where’d you pick that up?”
“My English teacher was an American guy. Malawi’s full of Americans. Look at you. What are you doing here?”
“Funny question,” Hock said.
“Hey, just a normal question. But I know the answer. Americans like coming to the bush. Even big celebrities and rich people. They’re in Monkey Bay, Mzuzu, on the lake. Karonga, and up on the plateau.”
“How do you know that?”
“I see them. My job takes me around.”
“I thought you were a student.”
“I dropped out. It was a waste of time. And it’s a laugh what teachers earn here. I’m in community relations for the Agency.”
“L’Agence Anonyme, that one?”
“Yeah. The chief got me the job. He was a driver for them.”
“But he quit — or was he fired?”
“You have to ask him, bwana.”
Aubrey was quick, his English excellent, yet he seemed winded by the back-and-forth. As if from the effort of his replies, he perspired heavily, rare for a Sena man under a tree at dusk.
“How long are you going to be here in Malabo?”
“I’m day-to-day,” Aubrey said.
No one spoke English well in Malabo. Manyenga’s was generally correct and idiomatic, but his accent made it hard for Hock to understand him at times. This fellow Aubrey spoke English in a way that made him hard to fathom. He was a little too well spoken, evasive, quick to deflect, so fluent as to sound glib.
“Maybe I’ll see a bit more of you.”
Aubrey said, “Whatever.”
“Community relations sounds important.”
“Not really. Mzungus get afraid in the villages. I run interference,” Aubrey said. “Sometimes damage control.”
Hock nodded, at first impressed by the deft replies, then put on guard by the casual jargon that had worried him with Manyenga.
“The Agency is mostly Europeans. They think we are dirty and dangerous.” Aubrey laughed. “Some of the villages are dirty, but they’re not dangerous. They love the food drops.”
“What’s a food drop?”
“Chopper flies into a prearranged site and unloads.”
“On the Lower River?” Hock asked, pretending ignorance.
“All over.”
“I’d like to see it sometime.”
“It’s usually a zoo.”
“Why is that?”
“Free food. Hungry people. Do the math.” Now Hock began to hate him, but before he could say anything more, Aubrey looked at his watch, which hung loosely, like a roomy bracelet, on his thin wrist, and said, “I gotta go. Maybe catch you later.”
23
THE DAYS BURNED BY, and on some smoldering late afternoons of suffocating aimlessness he felt that if he had a gun, he’d march Festus Manyenga to the creek and, in front of the whole gaping village, riddle him with bullets, then kick his bleeding corpse into the water. He sat on his slanting veranda, imagining this horror, sometimes smiling. Even in the times when they were talking — friendly enough, “We are liking you, father,” “I’m glad I came back,” all that — he wanted to twist a viper around the man’s neck and watch the hammer stroke of the fanged mouth against his terrified face.
Hock had, as well, an image of himself holding a cloth bag, like one of the food bags from the Agency that bulged with rice or flour, saying, “Money, take it,” and watching Manyenga reach into the bag that held — money, yes, but also a knot of venomous snakes. See how their wrist scars of snake medicine worked then.
He was ashamed of his smile and tried to stifle these thoughts — they were desperate, unworthy of him. But not having the strength to attempt another escape made him feel feeble. And though he tried to consider the villagers indulgently, he didn’t trust them. None had helped him; they knew he was helpless, and they were especially cruel to the weak.
Yet Aubrey, fresh from Blantyre, connected to the Agency, was someone from the outer world, moving easily in his new shoes from that world to the village and back; someone who might help him. Manyenga could be enigmatic in his demands — he was superstitious, irrational, excitable, oblique, a villager — but Aubrey, with his smart-guy English and his worldly sarcasm, was different. He was greedy, he was knowable.